Tradition

Author(s): Henry Glassie

Source: The Journal of American Folklore , Autumn, 1995, Vol. 108, No. 430, Common
Ground: Keywords for the Study of Expressive Culture (Autumn, 1995), pp. 395-412
Published by: American Folklore Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/541653

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 HENRY GLASSIE

Tradition

ACCEPT, TO BEGIN, that tradition is the creation of the future out of the past. A
continuous process situated in the nothingness of the present, linking the
vanished with the unknown, tradition is stopped, parceled, and codified by
thinkers who fix upon this aspect or that, in accord with their needs or
preoccupations, and leave us with a scatter of apparently contradictory, yet
cogent, definitions. More important, I believe, than erecting and polishing a
new definition, which would but stand as a monument to the worries of our
unmemorable era, is developing an understanding of the concept in the breadth
of its semantic extent. Widening into an embrace of the many ways people
convert the old into the new, tradition spreads into association with adjacent,
related, equally indispensable terms. Our understanding begins as we refine
tradition in conjunction with history and culture.

History

History is not the past; it is an artful assembly of materials from the past,
designed for usefulness in the future. In this way, history verges upon that idea
of tradition in which it is identified with the resource out of which people create.
History and tradition are comparable in dynamic; they exclude more than they
include, and so remain open to endless revision. They are functionally congruent
in their incorporation of the usable past. But the terms cannot be reduced, one
to the other.

Overtly, histories are accounts of the past. Their authors, acceding to the
demands of narration, customarily seek change, the transformations by which
they can get their story told. Change and tradition are commonly coupled, in
chat and chapter titles, as antonyms. But tradition is the opposite of only one
kind of change: that in which disruption is so complete that the new cannot be
read as an innovative adaptation of the old. Discovering one variety of pottery
lying above another in the silent earth, the archaeologist is tempted to interpret
the site as the record of invasion. Undisturbed, the people would have continued
to alter their old pottery, driving their ceramic tradition through a sequence of
linked stages, but a clean break followed by novelty implies replacement, hints
of violence; one tradition has gone, another has come.

Henry Glassie is College Professor of Folklore at Indiana University

Journal ofAmerican Folklore 108(430):395-412. Copyright ? 1995, American Folklore Society.

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396 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

If tradition is a people's creation out of their own past, its charac

stasis but continuity; its opposite is not change but oppression, the in
a power that thwarts the course of development. Oppressed people ar
do what others will them to do. They become slaves in the ceramic f
their masters. Acting traditionally, by contrast, they use their own
their own tradition, one might say -to create their own future, to do
will themselves to do. They make their own pots.
The point at which traditions die, at which one tradition replaces
might be described by the historian as the moment in which a super
replaces an inferior. The superior, the active agent of the tale, is granted
made human, while the inferior is converted into circumstance, like c
topography, reduced to a complicating factor in the context of pro
folklorist might see the same moment as one in which a will, inferior
though perhaps superior in virtue, was conquered, the conqueror bei
to a destructive circumstance-environmental like a cyclone-in
context of creation. History is ill served by dichotomizing human be
angelic and bestial, active and passive, victors and victims-some ble
volition, others the creatures of circumstance. A better history wou
the engagement of wills, of the interaction among traditions, each fr
value, all driving toward their several visions of the future.
Historians need tradition. For one thing, it would wean them fro
obsession with rupture, free them from the need to segment time
periods, and enable them to face the massive fact of continuity
1994c:963-968; cf. Braudel 1980:29-34, 67-69; Evans 1973:1-17; Levi
1991:135-141; Zimmer 1946:170). Not only in the cool, nonliterate society o
the cyclical Eastern society, but also in the hot, progressive societies of the West
life goes on, people are born, they love and work and pass away. Most of t
which makes up life, and makes it endurable, is neglected in history because
cannot be gracefully assimilated into hearty narratives of violent change. Yo
can witness the struggle as the great Fernand Braudel, striving to limn th
structures of everyday life, lapses into an ethnocentric evolutionism to brin
order into his story (e.g., Braudel 1992:193-194, 205-206, 286, 304-311, 313,
323-324, 423, 495-497, 548). What Braudel needed was a tough, pliable id
of tradition that would have allowed him to collect continuity and revolut
into a useful approximation of the past.
One boon tradition holds for history is that it would help historians hand
the massive matter of continuity, perhaps guiding them to discrimination
among the disparate occurrences jumbled under the rubric of change. F
another thing, the big events, the instances of raucous conflict that punctu
the tale, would return to human scale and grow in interest if they were imagined
as times when traditions-distinct styles of volitional, temporal action-met
merged, recoiled, or hardened into antagonism.
Since Herodotus, the eastern Mediterranean has been pictured in the West
the division between continents, the borderland between people complete i
their difference. War, then, from Troy to the Persian Gulf, seems inevitab

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 Glassie, Tradition 397

But how much subtler it is to view

in continuous conflict because, as B
theological traditions, while, as Jo
traditions of warfare (Lewis 1993
332).
Or consider the American Civil War. The mind numbs with lists of causes
and balks at notions of mere difference between the North and South. The
southern adventure in romantic nationalism created rival claimants to the
American heritage; Herman Melville was disturbed to find Robert E. Lee to
be-as he contrived to be--the new Washington (Anderson and Anderso
1989:572). The big pattern in the eastern theater becomes clearer when it is
realized that the leaders of both sides were trained in the same tradition, that
they adhered to the same culture of war, and that men in the ranks in both armies
shared a tradition of political order. The result was stalemate, as every invasion
of alien territory ended in defeat. Then the theory of command shifted in th
North. The North did not defeat the South; the West defeated the East (cf.
Churchill 1985:7). The westerner Lincoln, willing to suspend the Constitution
in his righteous cause, gathered western generals, willing to suspend the accepted
rules of warfare. The new leaders, acknowledging number and acting out of th
trans-Appalachian tradition of pragmatism that had made the western theater s
unlike the eastern, pressed on, reeling from defeat to defeat, wasting land an
lives, until victory had been won.
The simple story dissolves into a mixed welter of conflict. Slavery was the
issue, but Pat Cleburne, a Confederate general fated for death at the battle a
Franklin in Tennessee, was surprised to learn it from the response he received
to his proposal that African American men be enlisted; and the Emancipation
Proclamation precipitated mass desertion from the Union army (Foote
1963:631-638, 953-955). Boredom, diarrhea, religiosity, and ethnic prejudice,
in humor and assault, unified the men at war. Class difference, reified in insignia,
cut across the line drawn at the front, as men hid their fraternization from their
leaders, and made young officers the butts of their jokes and old officers into
objects of patriarchal veneration. And what of the gendered war: the women
who clamored for secession at the convention where Jubal Early, who would
lead his troops to the suburbs of Washington and watch them wither in the
Valley of Virginia, spoke for union; the woman on the road to Appomattox wh
asked an officer for her man because it was time to plow (Osborne 1992:34-52;
Wheeler 1989:140-143)?
A history of traditions unfolding out of different presuppositions into different
visions of the future, and therefore often into conflict, undermines the clarit
war demands, making it seem fortuitous that the right result was achieved in
1865. That it might have been different is proved by the subsequent period in
world history, marked by spatial fragmentation in Ireland, the Balkans, the
Middle East, India, Korea, Vietnam, and the Soviet Union. The student of the
aftermath of the Civil War-or, in terms to fit this essay, the student of th
Confederate tradition nurtured in reminiscence-might find it interesting to

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398 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

ponder the degree to which the process of fragmentation, segregat

deemed to be irreconcilably different into different countries, thereb
an era of dirty little wars, was advanced in the day of the League of
Woodrow Wilson, a child of old Virginia, and, in the vigorous, sim
language of our time, a racist. At least, the wars of our days, like the
are not to be understood as simple and inevitable instants of pure co
as moments of the mad convergence of different styles of creating t
Tradition, a key to historical knowledge, is to be understood as a pr
cultural construction.

Culture

Tradition and culture share vulnerability to superorganic conceptualization.

Both are, at times, assigned deterministic roles in human affairs. But existential
reformulation in the social sciences, now in its third or fourth generation and
so far from its source as to require a new name-postmodernism-has properly
inspired us to relocate power in people. There were distractions while structural,
then poststructural, vocabularies were developed to clothe our thought, but
culture and tradition are alike in that, today, we understand them both to be
created by human beings going through life. The fact that cultures and traditions
are created, invented-willfully compiled by knowledgeable individuals-seems
a surprise to scholars who cling to superorganic concepts and who invent, in
order to sharpen spurious contrasts, uninvented, natural traditions (see
Hobsbawm 1992; e.g., Moeran 1984:122-124, 133-135, 166-167, 178, 213-
214, 232), much as the ethnographers of an earlier day, surprised by the impurity
of their field sites, drifted into dreams of a mythic time before change, and
invented natural, static, functionally pat cultures. But culture and tradition, we
have come to accept, are created by individuals out of experience. They have
reasons for their actions, and their actions entail change.
Recognizing existentialism at the root of our thought, we should recall, in
these days of intolerance toward the ancestors, that existentialism, if now
metamorphosed into postmodernism, was once the dangerous philosophy of
modernism. Carried back to the dawn of modernism, to the beginnings of the
anthropology and folklore we still practice, we find two scientifically inclined
men heading west to discover traditions that were clearly distinct from those
dominant in the period. Boas among the Kwakiutl and Synge on the Arans
described what they saw-the winter ceremonial, the festival of thatching-as
old ideas newly enacted by real people with real names, in accordance with
values that set them apart, distinguished them collectively, from the people
among whom the observer usually lived (Boas 1966:179-208; Synge 1911:121-
123, 149-154). We could drop back another century to find Johnson and
Boswell on their westward search for alternative traditions (Pottle and Bennett
1936:3, 55, 63, 99-100, 135, 151-152, 186, 212-214, 221, 228, 263, 322, 326,
384) or continue to peel time away and follow Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo
eastward, but it is enough to say that culture and tradition are alike in that they

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 Glassie, Tradition 399

are constructed by individuals and

people who, as a consequence of in
develop ways that, being shared to
draw them together, while distingu
Though they approach synonymy,
reasons that made culture the mod
that make tradition, despite its detra
is a temporal concept, inherently tang
Culture comprises synchronic state
evolutionism, anthropologists stripped
scientific fashion prevalent in the
turation became an anthropological
Promising neoevolutionary argum
1972). Culture began to be resynthe
in which steady states are compare
ethnohistory remains peripheral, cu
titillates, and culture remains resistan
itowns no existence beyond tempor
the concept of culture. Culture re
concept. Now define tradition as c
culture exists, and it emerges as the s
missing piece necessary to the suc
anthropology and history, with fol
alliance.

In that scientistic time when culture was preferred to tradition for its ahisto-
rical-nonhumanistic-properties, it was also valued for its comprehensive,
systemic nature. Tradition seemed fragmentary, ad hoc, resistant to systemati-
zation. There is a way to talk about tradition that pushes it toward culture; we
might speak of a "French tradition." In doing so, however, we seem not to
imply a totalizing system but a historical linking of select, peculiarly French
traits, and it feels more comfortable to speak more particularly of a French
tradition in cuisine, or even a Western tradition of philosophy. Interest groups
coalesce, people teach, learn, innovate, and teach again, and culture becomes a
concatenation of diverse efforts to construct it. Politicians, priests, and poets, all
French perhaps, do it differently, maintaining distinct styles of cultural construc-
tion, different traditions. We need not, then, think of culture as a consistent
whole within which deviant versions are shaped by the rich or the poor, children
or old folks, women or men. Instead of commencing with a comprehensive
concept, we can move inductively, attentive to detail and disjunction, bit by bit
working toward an unachievable completeness, learning how people, each of
them individual, all of them social, use the resources within their command to
create. Then we can note the ways in which their actions and interpretations
align or conflict with what others do and say they do. Culture need not be
abandoned. It can remain one of the goals toward which we work while speaking
of the interactions among traditions. Another of the goals in history.

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400 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

Folklore

Tradition shadows the effort to define folklore. More than a sign

insecurity, the argument over folklore's definition enwraps our moral
incorporates our concern for authenticity (Glassie 1983). If that which
is that which is authentic, there is reason aplenty to be concern
folklore is and what it is not.

When folklore was distinguished by phenomenal patterning, authenticity was

signaled by the simultaneity of the paradoxical traits of continuity and variability.
Tales and houses were qualified as "folk" if antecedents could be arrayed behind
them and uniqueness discerned within them. Alike and not alike, the objects of
folklore were products of tradition, a process momentarily in the control of an
individual whose peculiar presence was exhibited in variation, whose submission
to the collective's need for order was displayed in an effort at continuity. It
followed that tradition would be construed as a vehicle to authenticity, a means
for achieving at once individual and social success. How could one accomplish
the self without recourse to conventional media, learned in social experience,
like language? How could society cohere without the compliant, consensual acts
of individuals? And it followed that the inauthentic, the nonfolkloristic, was that
which lacked tolerance for individual expressiveness, breeding alienation, or that
which blocked continuity, begetting oppression.
When, as a result of the existentialization of the discipline during the paradig-
matic crisis brought on by intensification of field research (e.g., Leach 1963),
we folklorists shifted our attention from arrays of objects to people in action,
authenticity became situated in artistic communication in small groups. Arguing
for his new definition of folklore, Dan Ben-Amos explicitly excluded tradition
(Ben-Amos 1972:13-14; cf. Oring 1994:221). That fit the mood a quarter of a
century ago, but Ben-Amos did not banish tradition from the discipline. He is
the author of the one article on the subject that must be read (Ben-Amos 1984;
cf. Rapoport 1989:79-100; Williams 1976:268-269). And his definition gained
quick acceptance and remains, for me at least, adequate because it captured old
virtues in new words (Glassie 1989a:24-35).
Folk and lore link people and expression in a functional circle. Epic and nation,
myth and society, custom and community-all conjoin communications and
groups. The group exists because its members create communications that call
it together and bring it to order. Communications exist because people acting
together, telling tales at the hearth, or sending signals through computerized
networks develop significant forms that function at once as signs of identity and
forces for cohesion.
To define folklore as communication within groups might have seemed
satisfactory at the time. Dan Ben-Amos, however, added qualifiers that main-
tained the discipline's humanistic strain, provided continuity in a time of change,
and welcomed the return of tradition by whatever name it would bear in the
future. There might be communications that do not depend upon tradition,
maybe the smile or the wail of sorrow issues from our genetic makeup. But

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 Glassie, Tradition 401

communications qualified as "arti

tions, and evaluations that require
creation and interpretation to sha
named traditions. There are certa
gathered into units by police sweep
but the group called "small" is only
constituted by the artistic commu
The "small group" is like the "tradit
by customary conduct. Its order der
remain theirs to enact, modify, o
traditional society is the society gov
vested in the state. So radicals view t
liberals see it as a retarded stage o
nationalists work in vain for the
deconstructionists undermine both,
victory of their class will be secured
daily life, people sometimes shift eas
gathering with friends for tea and c
within the speed limit on a national
movement. At other times, as E. P. T
custom and law come into conflict as
seek to expand the province of law,
consolidation of custom (E. P. Tho
336-339, 460, 530; cf. Burke 1988:
and familiar, becomes formalized
sistance.

Accepting artistic communication in small groups as their definition, folklor-

ists are not directed to the study of all of life. They come to focus on its moments
of authenticity, when individual commitment brings social association. Their
realm of the inauthentic, then, would contain nonartistic actions, the coerced
or the perfunctory, and social orders so scaled that cohesion is trivial or merely legal.
Definitions of folklore by phenomenal patterning or artistic communication
share anxieties about the survival of authenticity in the contexts of technological
elaboration and the rise of the nation state. Both definitions shape programs of
research that begin in reality and urge folklorists to abandon stratified concepts
of society and learn to work from the inside out, from the place where people
have the power to govern their own lives to the spaces in which their powers
evaporate. The discipline's mission becomes balancing and complicating his-
tory's linear tale of sequential triumphs by attention to real people-women at
the loom, men on the battlefield-operating in terms of their own limited
capacity to construct the future.

Tradition in Performance

Inspired by Dell Hymes and Richard Bauman, we folklorists are apt to call
the instants during which people create their own lives "performances" (see

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402 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

Bauman 1978, 1986; Hymes 1974:92-117, 128-134, 1981:79-259). It

of the theory of performance, a reason for its longevity as a central c
it accommodates the spirit of both the phenomenal and the comm
definitions of folklore. The dynamic of the phenomenal definition
sion. When it conditioned our effort, we asked people where they
songs and in doing so worked to draw lines of transmission runnin
in time from source to singer. The communicational definitio
horizontal exchange between singer and audience. But performan
time, and within it acts of transmission and communication coin
audience member hears, enjoys, forgets; another absorbs the son
performer and a link in the chain of transmission.
Unifying transmission and communication, education and enter
performances are shaped differently by their participants to include, f
greater or lesser degrees of interaction. And, in line with their interes
can place the stress differently, featuring the vertical or horizontal, t
or social, dimensions of a performance. But the performer is pos
complex nexus of responsibility. Taking command in the events
the future will rise, performers must, at once, keep faith with the pa
deceased teachers, and with the present, the mumbling members of
who seek engagement now and might act later upon what they lea
the "variability" component of the phenomenal definition and th
component of the communicational definition suggest, performer
faith with themselves. Let me clarify these abstractions with real c
In the early 1960s, I often visited N. T. Ward of Sugar Grove, No
He knew many ancient ballads and several unusual local songs, an
recast an old song into an account of the rough lifestyle he adop
wife's death. My intention in those days, when we accepted the o
documentation, was to record Tab Ward's entire repertory (c
1970:147-160; Goldstein 1964:134-138). We spent hours with
corder, and I was fortunate to hear him perform frequently for his n
his kitchen and in the local store where the musicians gathered. Th
heard him play was one day when, seeing his orange pickup in the
he was home and walked up on the porch. He was inside, singing
Gold Tree," accompanying himself on the plywood fretless banjo h
I stood and listened. The quality of his performance, the full volume o
the energy in his hands, suggested he was playing for a valued and kno
audience. He was. I entered and found him completely alone. I like
Ward told me, and I like to hear the old songs. I remembered We
banjo picker from farther down the Blue Ridge, who played only
after chores, on the back porch. Wes Sharp was one of the best mu
ever met, but he told me that he would not play in public for five
he played, he said, only for his own amazement. Tab Ward
anywhere, any time, but he played best for himself.
My grandmother, Alice Chichester Poch, was born in a log cabi
on a hardscrabble farm in the Piedmont. The baby of a big family,

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 Glassie, Tradition 403

enough to alter her birthdate in

embodiment of elegance, pulling thi
pocket of her wasp-waisted jacket wit
shotgun from the wall in the hall.
hits, and at day's end she would bri
continues to define excellence in foo
feverish nights with marvelous stor
those tales had Aarne-Thompson num
She remembered that she had learne
still know them, she told me, but sh
until my children were old enough
eyes, and let the stories roll out, faul
not folktales; they had no existence
in which little children are frigh
readied for sleep.
When I asked Peter Flanagan, a mas
the musical star of the Irish commu
replied that he had nurtured his gi
reason loftier than getting free drink
help people find the right road th
compare his gift of music to the pr
Mass, was founded upon the local v
short, and hard, if you slip into co
sucked toward despair, the deadliest
prevent others from thinking too mu
his brother served, like the chat that
Peter Flanagan defined entertainme
to do them good. He fiddled to ente
into social engagement, to keep his ne
and moving on the right road t
467-473).
Lars Andersson's interest in potte
lessons and became a teacher of c
practice peculiar to his region-S
Anderberg, old master of the potte
pottery close, rather than sell it
standards, but Lars Andersson impr
Lars likened to that of grandfather
a motorcycle accident, he had taugh
has built a museum in the factory, se
Hugo's picture hangs on the wall, t
at the wheel and kiln to make salt-g
Lars is pleased that his customers
Flanagan said of the people in his audi
and they will gladly accept less than

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404 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

understand. To create the best requires upholding personal standards,

Lars Andersson that means making new pots of which Hugo Anderberg
approve (Glassie 1994b:3; see Von Friesen 1976).
Yusuf Sezer describes his life's duty as passing his art unspoiled to the
Born to be a farmer in a mountain village in northern Turkey, Yusuf e
tered the art of calligraphy by chance. It changed his life. Seeking deeper m
he moved to Istanbul and received his icazetname, the diploma empower
to sign his works, from Hattat Hamid Ayta?, the greatest calligraphe
generation, who had come, like Yusuf, from Anatolia to Istanbul for
(see inal 1970:122-126; Ulker 1987:90-91). Through Hattat Hamid Bey
Sezer connects to an unbroken succession of teachers and learners, str
back to the great master of the 16th century, 5eyh Hamdullah. Proud to
to this noble genealogy, Yusuf says it is his duty to practice correctly
bequeath a robust art to the future. But, he argues, he would not serve
if he restricted himself to reproduction. Instead, weathering criticism
connoisseurs, he feels he must adapt and innovate, making changes to s
times. Otherwise the new people of a new age, the girls and boys he t
would not be inspired to learn the art and carry it forward. Yusuf be
calligraphy was a special gift made by God to the Turks. Its enactment i
the measured inscription of God's very word. No art is more importa
Yusuf Sezer must make changes in it to keep history moving smoothly
the future (Glassie 1993:130-137, 813-814).
In an endless ring of fire, the Lord Shiva dances. His left foot is lifted del
from the earth; his right foot tramples the dwarf of ignorance. In one of h
hands, he holds the drum that sets the rhythm of universal life. In one of h
hands burns the flame that will consume the world, now in the fourth of it
phases-that time when people neglect the sacred and become obsess
possessions, when teachers descend to vulgarity, the old attempt to seem
and the young lack enthusiasm (Coomaraswamy 1971:17-22; Zimmer 19
36, 152-175). The iconic form was established a thousand years ago in
India, but this image in brass, gleaming like gold, is a month old. It o
existence to Rashida Musharaf, in Dhamrai, Bangladesh, who command
men who model in wax, shape the clay mold, and cast the image in a st
molten metal. Ananda Pal, sculptor of the enormous, terrifying image
that occupies a new temple on the other side of Dhamrai, prayed and
the model in accord with Hindu precept, but Rashida, a Muslim, direc
casting into permanence. She is pleased to help her Hindu neighbors, p
to carry on the difficult craft of her deceased husband, but she is emphatic
her work, this god of other people, and she has made it because she is a
of power.
It begins when the earthen egg of the crucible is cracked, when the lips part,
the lump of clay is centered on the wheel. Yusuf Sezer touches black ink to
white paper, Peter Flanagan lifts the bow to the strings. They take control, and
they are performing when their multiplex responsibilities fuse in the heat of

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 Glassie, Tradition 405

creation. Isolating within perform

without which it could not be, we

Patterns of Historical Respo

Simple definitions dismiss traditio

feeling tradition deserves no place
characterizes it as static. Another, fav
in modern life by calling it fluid and
and emergence. But tradition can b
place, revolving through kaleidosco
progressive, or retrograde tracks
Change, as William Morris observ
of tradition (Morris 1898:157-15
changes so subtle as to provide an
continuity. Wills collide and conve
through elaboration or compression
1961; Glassie 1974:181-188, 205-2
since traditions exclude as well as i
(cf. Williams 1977:115-120). In pro
sharp focus, dismissing others-tho
a dead past. A progressive tradition
modernization. In modernization t
international claim attention and dr
modernization depend upon the sim
tered by revival, by efforts to rev
local dimensions of human existen
see Alver 1992; Burrison 1995:xiv-
1984:72-73, 85-143; Oring 1992:7
ster 1991). Civic festivals, new vers
consolidation of oppositional religi
through revival, a feature of the co
as modernization. One tradition is
thought and beneath common life, th
of the long duration (Braudel 1973
26-52, 202-217). Another, noisy an
tradition is built of recursive work
things. All of these traditions blen
to congratulate ourselves for endur
traditions dedicated to stability, pr
golden age of integration lies in th
thus.

All objects are traditional, in the

surprisingly, out of precedent. The
lie routine behaviors during which

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406 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

stable field of old solutions, bearing down on the matter at hand whil
the aid of the dead in the conduct of daily life (cf. Yanagi 1989:135
the other end lie energetic quests for novelty that eventuate in the creat
George Kubler named prime objects (Kubler 1962:39-61). The prim
recognized as new and worthy of replication (the first image of Shiv
the Dance, for instance), requires a risky, valiant stretch during whic
is reformulated, revitalized, or replaced. The question of authenticity
the range of tradition is narrowed further by attitude. In my world, spu
rapid changes necessary to capitalism, a scholar will alter a word or two i
formula and proclaim a new theory that will liberate us from the de
tradition. In Rayer Bazar, the old pottery district of Dhaka, the capi
Bangladesh, Mohammed Ali uses a new kind of clay and new t
techniques to make new kinds of objects, yet stresses the traditional
effort. To close, I shall suggest the range of ways in which people
historical responsibilities by sketching three modes of volitional, tempora
that their practitioners consider traditional.
One is repetition. A perfect instance is Hadith. Literally reports or
and often translated "traditions," Hadith are extra-Koranic revelations
of the Prophet, sometimes set in narrative frames. Before they wer
down, Hadith were memorized for verbatim repetition, and those jud
reliable are accompanied by fastidious statements of their chains of trans
It is logical that sacred words holding the force of law would be com
memory. But in my days of collecting folksongs in the rural Unite
found singers frequently declaring that they were repeating an old song
word for word, as they had received it. In 1962, Paul Clayton Worth
I recorded the ballads that Ruby Bowman Plemmons had sung for Ar
Davis 30 years before. Separated by three decades, the texts containe
in only 20 out of 276 lines. All were minor, and though all exempli
variability of oral performance, only one was purposeful. When Rub
was a young woman from the mountains of Virginia, singing for a
young collector, she gentled one line in "Little Massey Groves." As
woman, she restored the original, more explicit words (Glassie 1970
Davis 1960:172-175; cf. Mackenzie 1917:167-170). The songs were
they had come from her dear mother, and while, of course, she met
of performance with her own spirit as a singer, at the heart of things sh
on her memory to hold and repeat the lyrics exactly.
With repetition the goal, people create and adopt aids to memory. P
write texts down for preservation (e.g., Carey 1976:13-20; D~gh 198
Morton 1973:10; Scarborough 1937:15-16; H. W. Thompson 1958:x
Appalachia and in Ireland, I met singers who kept and traded m
"ballats." People refresh their memories from books and recordings
songs learned from their parents become textually identical with thos
or wax. Reference to external authority is not limited to late, li
technologically elaborated scenes. In medieval Ireland, as in the recent
and in widely separated parts of Africa, most notably Somalia, the ro

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 Glassie, Tradition 407

and singer separate, and the singer

repetition (Bergin 1970:5-10; Finn
711). Traditions of creation are oft
designed to check creative excess. R
of images were directed not only by t
critics who evaluated new works
(BaSe'mez 1989:13-16; Michell 198
Owens mustered young Peter Flanag
mumming squad, they taught them th
"the mummers' rule" that provided
norms for performance (Glassie 19
For certain genres, among certain pe
goal is repetition (e.g., Ives 1978:39
such situations, folklorists learn to em
as things, items, as song texts and quilt
In Ballymenone, where singers feel
with care, where the young men m
mummers' rule on their rowdy ram
Nolan, the community's revered his
hold to the truth and use words of
113, 118-119, 144-147, 699-705). To
must tell the whole tale, and to d
rendition. Sometimes the wish is t
composer of stories-composer, not
a singer putting a poem into perfo
generally do in the legends that he
is, in Hugh Nolan's words, to gathe
version. Then cleaving to that vers
teller is obliged, owing to the limit
every audience, to use words of his
Some matters are nonnegotiable. U
that filled his body with pleasure, wh
people assembled at the small fire i
between what was essential and wha
He reduced the past to features wo
key quotations-then held them rea
strung together when he invented a
rably, potters in the United States
certain aspects of old practice, while r
innovation. The women at Acoma an
pottery traditional if its technology
firing, follows received procedure.
experiment. Performers who establ
able and the invariant become capab
1971:50-51; e.g., Buchan 1972:158

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408 Journal of American Folklore 108 (1995)

Holbek 1987:205, 407; Jones 1989:245; Lord 1960:88-123, 230-231; R

jan 1992:25, 44-46; Vlach 1992:88-93). Artists who merge preserva
experimentation in performance guide folklorists into understanding t
as a dimension within every creative act.
In one dynamic, the whole is repeated. In another, entities are disme
and essences are preserved. In a third, what is preserved is a general
sound, a look, a certain spirit. Turkish artisans have a word for tradition, g
but they do not envision the traditional, the geleneksel, as requiring a strug
memorize or preserve. They see it as the ineluctable consequence of h
experience, the result of growth among unavoidable influences. They
trained by a master in an atelier. But their training involved little by
formal instruction. Instead, the master established a climate of disciplin
which, the artisans tell me, they worked, watched, tried, and, at last
themselves (Glassie 1989a:92-106, 1989b:34, 37-38, 1989c:16-19, 199
209, 527-530, 669-677, 701-703, 813-819, 830-832, 862-869; cf. Cooma-
raswamy 1956:76-77; Frykman and Lifgren 1987:45; Saga 1990:216-217,
235-237). Then aspiring toward perfection, stretching for adult status, they
simultaneously accomplished personal success and the incarnation of traditio
in new things.
Mehmet Giirsoy, a leading potter in Kiitahya, a city in western Turkey wher
forty thousand people work in the ceramic trade, employed Sufi metaphor to put
it like this. In youth, while learning, you breathe in the air of experience. The air
circulates within, mingling with the breath of your own soul. Then in creation you
exhale and your works emit a certain hava, an air that they inevitably share with
works created by others who inhale and exhale within the same atmosphere.
Mehmet's creations, brought out of his own body, are exactly like no others in the
world. Yet he has shaped them out of life in a particular time and place, and so they
must, in some measure, resemble those of his colleagues and competitors-ibrahim
Erdeyer, Nurten Sahin, Saim Kolhan, Sitki Olpar-as well as those of the master
in the generation before them, Hakki Ermumcu and Faruk Sahin. And so they will
seem both fresh and familiar to the buyers in the market who matured in the sam
cultural environment. Artists in Kiitahya are not obliged to memorize or preserve.
They can do whatever they want to do-closely copying antique masterpieces,
cleverly blending the models around them, boldly inventing original designs-be
cause, being suspended in the alembic of collective experience, when they act
authentically, their creations will necessarily, nonchalantly radiate the aura of
tradition. From such examples, folklorists learn to understand tradition as a process
an integrated style of creation.
Things vary with need and circumstance, by genre and culture. The more
secure, the less embattled the actor, the freer the action. But when actions ar
shaped sincerely, tradition will be present.

Volitional, Temporal Action

At the end it is customary to repeat for clarity. While agreeing with Rabin-
dranath Tagore that clarity is not the highest purpose in communication (Tagor

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 Glassie, Tradition 409

1980:73), I will comply with tradit

and repeat that tradition is the means
then define tradition, once again, a
the routine to the inventive, tradit
scholarly interest and-and this is m
among cultures. In different situa
products, whether casual or canonic
axis within creative acts, or as the
culture. As resource and process, as w
tradition-or something like it with
of culture. History need not be seen
power that causes changes in synch
component of culture, its adaptive
culture be ranged beyond the reac
the yield of small acts. History, cul

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